ID of accident victim lagged despite report

For five weeks the accident victim was an unknown - a corpse in a cooler in the county morgue, case number 08-1379.

He was carrying no ID when he stepped in front of an oncoming SUV five days before Christmas on Military Trail west of Lake Worth.

No one recognized his picture when Gary Pace, a sheriff's investigator, took a photo door to door.

No one was asking about him or appeared to miss him, Pace said in mid-January, frustrated by a paucity of leads and haunted by the thought that a family somewhere - in Central America, he guessed - was missing kin.

Finally, this week, Pace and a Spanish-speaking assistant, working the numbers on the dead man's cell phone, found an acquaintance.

Their victim was Jorge "Jose" Francisco Velasquez, 30, a native of Guatemala, last living in a home along Haverhill Road about a mile from where he had been killed on impact.

Velasquez was not so unknown after all. His brother and other relatives had filed a missing-person report with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. That report was on file even as the sheriff's Vehicle Homicide Unit was trying to identify the victim. But no one connected the two.

Velasquez's brother, Norberto Velasquez, a nursery worker who lives west of Lake Worth, said he began worrying about Velasquez the night of the accident, Dec. 20.

Besides filing the missing-person report Dec. 26, Norberto Velasquez and a sister-in-law, Blanca Manuel, said they searched three hospitals for Jose Velasquez, a landscaping worker who had cognitive problems and was often disoriented.

They checked the jail, though Jose Velasquez had never been arrested. They said they checked the morgue three or four times.

Everywhere, authorities said they had no information.

"I don't know how in the world this could have happened," said Sue Steel, a medical examiner's forensic investigator assigned to the case. "You just feel bad for the family.

"It's sad to think that they had to keep coming back here," she added.

Steel said it's the first error of this type she has seen and that the Medical Examiner's Office is investigating.

Sheriff's officials cited the complexities of matching various and often imprecise reports.

In this case, descriptions in the separate reports did not match.

Jose Velasquez had been here about a year and a half. In Guatemala, he had a wife and four children, ages 2 to 11, and a mother with a weak heart.

"She wanted to at least give him his last goodbye," Norberto Velasquez said. "And I promised her that I would send his body back home."